Juliett's Trip to the Vet

It was an interesting critter week this week.  Piggy and ferrets are all fine. Ollie and Phoebe (kitties) were supposed to go to the vet on Wednesday for a thyroid panel to check their levels so we could renew their hyperthyroid medications. Fast forward to Tuesday evening when I get a panicky call from the hubs to report that Juliett has a giant lump on her head.  I get home and check her out and indeed, there is a large lump on the top/back of her head. She has a scratch on her nose so my suspicion was that she had an abscess similar to what Phoebe went through a few months ago.  Juliett was behaving like she was fine - great appetite, very active, no issues to suggest we needed an emergency vet visit. 

On Wednesday morning I called the vet to let them know that I was bringing one dog instead of two kitties. The lump on her head was not an abscess it was a hematoma. Evidently while roughhousing with her puppy siblings she whacked her head on something and a hematoma developed. The vet pulled the fluid out of it and looked under the microscope. There were red blood cells present but only a few white blood cells indicating there was no infection. We decided out of an abundance of caution we would do a week of antibiotics just to be sure. We didn't take any action on the hematoma - hopefully in the next week or so the body will reabsorb the fluid and it will go away.  It's already significantly smaller than it was.

We also decided while she was there to do all her annual stuff as she was due in March anyway. Her physical went well and her fecal and heartworm tests were both negative. We did have some concern that she had an elevated BUN number - the high end of normal is 27 and she was 38 and an elevated CREA number - while it was still in the normal range it was at the very top of the range. These elevated numbers can possibly indicate kidney disease. The vet recommended an additional test called SDMA which is a more sensitive test related to early detection of kidney disease - which we sent her blood sample over to the lab to run.  We had to wait overnight for results but the vet let me know on Thursday afternoon that her numbers on the more sensitive test were perfect and that the elevated numbers from the first round of testing were likely incidental and we didn't need to worry. Whew - she is fine and I am relieved.

Here she is at the vet - you can see the little scratch on her nose

...and chilling out before bed with her sister - Juliett on the left and Charli on the right

There are lots of camera trap photos to share from this week.  I think the warmer weather brought the critters out for sure.  I will post them over the weekend.  Happy Friday!!